Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality

Stephen G. Bloom

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520382275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment's purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students' eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work? Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott's jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town's children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the "Mother of Diversity Training, " who was driven against all odds to succeed.

ONE

The Corn

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, Iowa has produced more corn than any other place in the world, and in Jane Elliott’s hometown of Riceville, corn reigns supreme. Thousands of acres of it encircle Riceville the way shimmering water surrounds a tiny Pacific atoll. Corn grows quickly, shooting from seedling to eight-foot stalk in less than fourteen weeks. So rapid is its growth that in July, if you happen onto an Iowa cornfield, you’ll hear crunching, crackling sounds, a symphony of stretching and pulling as the nascent plants struggle to ascend toward the heavens.

Tucked within each husk, kernels have an exacting architectural precision. They’re staggered in interlocking rows, each row containing an even number of kernels. Farmers plant corn seed with the same precise rigor, rows plumb with nary a squiggle of deviation. Ninety-nine percent of the state’s crop is known as “field corn,” not to be confused with the sweet stuff to be eaten on the cob, slathered with butter, sprinkled with salt. Field corn is used for livestock feed, ethanol production, and corn syrup. It’s an entirely different species, with big ears and inside the husk, kernels that form dents as the corn dries. Most farms maintain a tiny plot of sweet corn, usually tended by children and sold on the side of the road from a pickup with its tailgate down. A dozen ears for five dollars is a fair price. The local version of Girl Scout Thin Mints.

The rows extend farther than the human eye can see, farther than most urban minds can fathom. On and on they go, seemingly forever. The glimmering fields have a way of insulating this pocket of rural America, buffering it from the rest of the nation’s vitality and vulgarity. The corn cushions Riceville, as though whatever happens here is wholly contained in a separate and complete universe. With a gentle lilt from a summer breeze, the russet silk strands sprouting from the green-sheathed ears create an undulating carpet of red and gold hues as the sun begins its daily elliptical descent over the ordered maize.

Corn isn’t the only harvest that defines Riceville. The confluence of pig and cattle manure is so sharp that the locals refer to Riceville as “Stinkville,” even though everyone seems so used to the stench (a combination of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide) that most insist they don’t smell anything. Iowa is the nation’s leading producer of pigs. The state’s population of three million is dwarfed by the multitude of hogs: at any given time, twenty-three million pigs call Iowa home, and on an annual basis, that amounts to almost fifty million swine, or about seventeen pigs per person. There’s a one-in-three chance that the bacon strips next to your eggs and hash browns this morning came from Iowa.¹

Corn, hogs, soybeans, and increasingly, wind-turbine energy are what define the state, along with the quadrennial Iowa caucuses, when itinerant presidential candidates show up in pressed denim and stiff leather boots, glad-handing anyone with a pulse. After 2020’s bungled caucus, the nation’s first presidential preference contest, with its arcane rules and unreliable returns, may never return. With Black residents making up only 4 percent of a statewide population of 3.1 million, how representative of the rest of America can Iowa be?²

In some ways, the state is a time warp. The state capital, Des Moines, the state’s largest city, has just 214,000 residents.³ Contained between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, 86 percent of the state’s landmass is farmland.⁴ What rises from the soil and what perambulates atop it are what make landlocked Iowa hum.

The state is a place of extremes. By Labor Day, the sunbaked summer is over. The fall of dappled orange and red, everyone’s favorite season, seemingly overnight yields to snow, sleet, and a curtain of steel gray that some years doesn’t rise until spring.

Winter runs mid-October to mid-April—and that’s a temperate year. Thirty to fifty degrees below zero with windchill is not uncommon. Teeth-chattering windstorms swirl and swell over the snowy meringue-white landscape. If you absolutely must make a road trip, blankets, flares, canned food (and can opener), and a fully charged cellphone are mandatory. If you ever get stranded in a snow drift on the side of a road, don’t think of leaving your car unless you know exactly where you are headed and exactly how long it will take to get there. Even then, it’s not a good idea. Best to stay with your vehicle and wait.

By the time Easter rolls around, a bluish-yellow winter pallor has washed over everyone’s face. By June, be prepared for golf-ball-sized hail and pelting rain. Tornadoes and a wind phenomenon known as derechos are also apt to visit. Then, in two blinks of an eye, spring switches into humid, sticky summer when mosquitoes buzz next to your ears, sounding like miniature chain saws.

All of this topsy-turvy meteorology seems somehow to comingle to nurture the seed, nestled in the notched furrows of dark, alluvial soil, to produce magnificent corn.

All over again. Season after season after season.

• • •

In 1855, twenty-five-year-old Dennis Rice, on an exploratory trip from Chautauqua County, New York, imagined a steam-operated flour- and sawmill along the rushing waters of the Wapsipinicon River in the northeast corner of the new state of Iowa. With his brothers Franklin and Gilbert, Rice platted the area and settled there, ensuring that the grid of a town growing up alongside the Wapsipinicon would forever be named Riceville.

Forty-seven years later, businessman F. A. Brown built above his Riceville hardgoods store on Main Street an eponymous opera house, which showcased a short film of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, and in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s epic, The Birth of a Nation. Brown brought to Riceville’s population of eight hundred traveling vaudeville, plays, circuses, and magic shows. The last performance at the opera house was in 1966, a variety show called “The Riceville Gaieties.” Five hand-painted, thick, stage-wide curtains that once hung in Brown’s Opera House now rest in storage in the Riceville Public Library, shown by appointment.

Chicago Great Western Railroad passenger trains used to pick up and discharge passengers in Riceville but in 1962, the town’s stop was discontinued since hardly anyone made the 330-mile trip to Chicago any longer. Riceville’s CGW depot closed in 1971 and eleven years later, the hot-rolled steel train tracks were extracted from the earth and hauled away. Instead of joining the rest of America, Riceville stayed put.

Today, the nearest traffic light is eighteen miles away. Riceville’s only elevator raises and lowers corn and soybeans, not people. A 150,000-gallon water tank atop a tower delivers more than enough to serve the needs of everyone in town, with a little extra to extinguish any reasonable fire that needs quenching. As late as 1981, Riceville residents used telephone party lines, and today, all landlines start with 985. The city’s telephone directory is six pages long. A tradition of the graduating class at Riceville High is silkscreened T-shirts with everyone’s name printed on front.

The area’s only growing population is Amish families. Several dozen live in nearby McIntire, and almost every year there are accidents and near-accidents of motor vehicles swerving to avoid horse-drawn buggies. Blond Amish children walk barefoot along the side of roads, the boys wearing suspenders, blue shirts, dark pants, straw-brim black-banded hats; the girls in long frocks and black-hooded bonnets. If a curious out-of-towner stops to inquire about directions, the children are instructed not to smile, and absolutely never to pose for photographs.

Riceville is an interlocking web of close-knit families, where everyone knows everyone else (as well as their cousins, first through fifth). There’s no city gate to enter or exit, but there might as well be. Iowa farming towns are scattered fifteen, twenty miles apart, and each hamlet is a nation unto itself, wholly governed by generations of familial rules, customs, reputations, and property. Access is locked with few stray keys.

Locals can tell who’s driving by the sound of a car or pickup. No one puts on turn signals because everyone knows where everyone else is going. As a greeting, farmers employ an index-finger wave from the top of their steering wheel. Unless it’s a stranger. Then, the salutation might well be a cocked chin and an arched eyebrow. Locals pay attention to an interloper’s license plates that if from Iowa, identify which of the state’s ninety-nine counties the driver is from. Within hours, news of the sighting, the make of the vehicle, along with a drive-by description of the stranger make the local rounds. Phones ring. Neighbors peek out from behind curtains.

What ever brought you here?

The cliché about farmers being laconic, stolid, and stoic comes from somewhere. Whatever it is will get fixed, replaced, or returned to normal in due time. Patience may be a virtue, but it’s the way to survive. Such behavior stems from the extreme weather, yes, but also from averse-to-change rural “values,” which may be code for Christian, white, churchgoing, and not trusting anyone from anywhere else. If you don’t like how things are around here, then you might think about moving. Say something bad about Iowa and prepare for an onslaught. Undying loyalty is required when it comes to the state and all that pertains to it. Sharp elbows belong somewhere else. With a degree of pride, residents like to boast they abide by something they call “Iowa nice.” At least, that’s what they say.

Prominent, long-standing Riceville families include the Asfahls, Bodenhams, Brunners, Christiansens, Congers, Dingers, Eastmans, Governs, Grupps, Lenths, Linkenmeyers, McGoverns, Mosers, Murphys, Setkas, Sprungs, and Swancutts. Five churches—Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Mennonite, and Baptist—aim to accommodate everyone’s preference.

Chili, the go-to staple at church potluck dinners, crosses all denominations. Dinner and supper are two entirely different meals; dinner is served in the early afternoon, supper in the evening. At family gatherings, casseroles are expected, Red Waldorf cake is welcomed, and Jell-O salad served on a bed of wilted lettuce is pretty much hated by anyone under fifty. Every family seems to maintain a proprietary recipe for beer-cheese soup, as well as the location of a “secret” out-of-the-way glade in which to find wild morels, which, sauteed in butter, melt in your mouth. Fish served up for supper is never bought, but caught by either you or someone you know. The closest Riceville gets to a Starbucks is Andy’s Mini-Mart, run by brothers Tom and Steve Anderlik, which opens at five a.m. so farmers can get their caffeine fix before sunrise. Locals leave their keys in the ignition, engine running, while dashing into the Casey’s on Main Street to pick up a half gallon of milk while chitchatting with Karen Hartman, one of the five Blake sisters, behind the counter.

The closest “big” city is the Mitchell County seat, Osage (population 3,568), eighteen miles away, but Riceville residents don’t often stray far. “I don’t recall a single person from Riceville,” said Monte Kloberdanz, seventy-eight, who was born in Osage, grew up there, and moved away for a spell, only to return several years ago. “Riceville’s always been a peculiar little burg on the way to Cresco and Decorah. You never went there; you just passed through on the way to someplace else...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Note: The Scab
• Prologue: The Tonight Show
• 1  •  The Corn
• 2  •  Dirty Little Bastards
• 3  •  Pizzui
• 4  •  Elysian Fields
• 5  •  From Memphis to Riceville
• 6  •  The Experiment
• 7  •  “Did She Really?”
• 8  •  “Here’s Johnny!”
• 9  •  Back Home
• 10  •  What Some of the Kids Said
• 11  •  Rotarians
• 12  •  “Eye of the Storm”
• 13  •  The White House
• 14  •  Trouble
• 15  •  Blackboard Jungle
• 16  •  Spooner
• 17  •  A Blind Spot
• 18  •  Class Reunion
• 19  •  The Offer
• 20  •  Unbound
• 21  •  Oprah
• 22  •  The Greater Good
• 23  •  The Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Goes On
• Afterword: The Case of Robert Coles and Others
• Coda: Andy’s and the Ville
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations